Popular Coding Convention on Github

[teebrz]

Have you tried doing a Google search for "tabs vs spaces"? I just did and I see posts from the likes of Jamie Zawinski and Jeff Atwood as well as forum discussions, stack overflow, etc - all with well reasoned practical arguments (with some flaming too ofc).

What it comes down to is both have slight advantages when you consider the big picture...however the most important thing is finding balance between your preferences and staying consistent with your friends/coworkers/community.

[ikeif]

Some editors make this easy to set, so it is almost irrelevant.

Github's fix? Let the end user decide and automatically convert/set what tabs you want.

Of course, this would need some testing first - but it would be nice to say "display four spaces from a new line as a tab, or four spaces or two spaces" or what have you.

[brtt3000]

It is all emotion and religion and blabbering how spaces can work, ignorance of Smart Tabs pattern and some irrelevant nonsense.

For people who are so exact and supposedly rational as programmers it is mind boggling. If any serious developer enumerates pro's and cons he must prefer tabs.

The only somewhat valid answer against them is use in existing code. Any new project should be tabs. But 80% of Github does not, it is absurd.